6 important tips for holiday season mobile marketing
The holiday season presents an abundance of opportunity for mobile marketers
So how can you reach the full potential of the holiday season and enjoy all the benefits that mobile marketing has to offer?
1.) Create hyper-personalized messages for your loyal customers
An effective messenger marketing strategy can improve the customer experience by offering a truly personalized, engaging and convenient customer service during the peak season.
It’s a fact: personalizing the customer experience to each specific customer makes them more likely to buy. In fact, it results in a higher likelihood of purchase in 80% of cases. It’s easy to see why, as it’s much more convenient for consumers, and data supports it – four in ten holiday shoppers are looking for retailers to remember personal details, like past sizes and items they’ve purchased. By integrating their CRM system with their messenger app of choice, brands can store customer interaction history and analyze their behavior in order to send useful and relevant personalized messages, at scale.
Here are a few holiday marketing ideas for your inspiration:
- Offer gift messaging and alerts that let your audience know when specific gift items they’ve shown an interest in have gone on sale or have been restocked.
- Create a digital gift guide with ideas for parents, significant others, friends, kids, and anyone else. Segment your audience and send the most relevant guides to your customers.
- Reward your mobile customers with exclusive coupons for the products they were interested in.
- Invite customers to take part in sweepstakes, instant win giveaways, and challenges over the items they showed interest in.
2.) Automate your customer service
In the always-on digital world, brands need to be available around the clock. Customers expect it: 71% of consumers expect brands to communicate with them in real time, whether it’s day or night. But it’s costly – and wasteful – to man the phones 24/7. Instead, chatbots can take on the bulk of the work and help to manage your holiday season mobile marketing.
Not only is it more cost-effective for brands, shoppers are also more likely to trust and to spend more money with retailers that support both digital and in-store experiences with messaging and virtual assistants.
Messenger chatbots are available around the clock and answer customer questions instantly. They reduce personnel costs and automate routine processes, reduce user frustration with quick, timely replies, and generate analytical information about customers, which allows you to create an accurate portrait of the target audience and understand its needs (64% of customers are in favour of this). Plus they let you send relevant messages based on the customer journey to the product, communicating with users in their language, using interactive elements and gamification to engage customers during the holiday season – they are a direct path to "love for years".
3.) Use live agents to assist your customers
While chatbots can help respond to many questions, you still need real agents to take on more taxing customer queries. 86% of users expect chatbots to always be able to transfer to a live agent – this is even more important during the holiday season, when customers need gift-finding assistance from retail consultants online. Messenger apps’ two-way conversation feature lets real assistants guide shoppers’ gift choices, consult on size or product characteristics, and help in gift assemblance or installation.
Live agents can also take on board customer feedback to provide better customer service and turn new leads from the holiday season into loyal clients.
4.) Use a complex mobile marketing campaign
An advanced strategy of holiday season mobile marketing can help you stand out among the array of businesses running online.
For example, Coca-Cola devised an animated game within the Rakuten Viber messaging app to engage users in a fun way around Easter time. Easter Egg Fighter plays on the time-honored Eastern Europe tradition of a coloured Easter egg fight. The aim? To destroy your opponent’s egg, but playing online through a mobile game instead of in the real world. That way, users can play against anyone, regardless of where they are in the world.
Coca-Cola’s mobile marketing campaign included a customized Rakuten Viber Sticker pack with free downloads that led users to subscribe to the chatbot, a promotion within the Coca-Cola community on Rakuten Viber and personalized messages to bring chatbot subscribers into the game.
The results were staggering: in Bulgaria alone, it achieved 350,000 user interactions, an average user play time of over five-and-a-half minutes, and over 188,000 total played minutes. The number of chatbot subscribers also increased by 30%.
5.) Reduce cart abandonment
Consumers abandon their carts in anywhere between 70% and 90% of cases, and reducing these numbers might become a real struggle for business during the peak season of holiday shopping.
Messaging apps can help businesses reduce cart abandonment during the holiday season by sending personalized, proactive reminders, greetings and discounts directly to customers’ mobile phones, through a medium with a much higher open rate than email or other channels.
For example, a leading Ukrainian retailer Comfy used Rakuten Viber Business Messages to advance it’s communication with customers and reduce cart abandonment. Combination of an immediate reach, rich media and compelling CTAs, all linked to their website or targeted actions, allowed Comfy to achieve a 10% higher turnover and 30% higher conversion rate than SMS.
6.) Update customers on their shipping details
Customers want to know where their orders are and to have an opportunity to control delivery time, especially when waiting for the presents to arrive in time for the holidays. In one study, 41% of consumers ranked fast and reliable delivery as one of their top considerations when shopping online. Using messaging apps, you can alert customers when their order is ready and set a suitable time for the parcel to arrive, reducing customer frustration. A priceless holiday marketing idea for a busy shopping time.
Just ask D Express, a technically forward-thinking express courier service based in Serbia. It enlisted Rakuten Viber to improve its mobile marketing strategy and enhance its communication with its customers by letting them track their deliveries. Customers receive an automated and personalized message updating them on their delivery. They can then reply whenever it's convenient to a Rakuten Viber chat with a business account directly for more information or redirect the shipment.
Because there is no waiting for a call operator to answer, customer response times are vastly improved. Customers should enter a PIN code to validate their deliveries, and if the delivery attempt is unsuccessful they will receive a notification summarising their options.
The results speak for themselves: 85% of D Express’ 300,000 monthly Business Messages were delivered first time – that’s 15% more compared to before they started using Rakuten Viber. This helped D Express improve its service, boosting the customer experience and engendering trust and loyalty within its customer base.
With the holiday season approaching, businesses should include mobile digital platforms in their marketing strategies to reach the peak of holiday revenue. By leveraging mobile marketing, businesses can become closer to their customers through a more intimate communication channel and put customers only one click away from the purchase.
Rakuten Viber for Business solutions can help businesses simplify customer support and interactions, benefit customer experience and allow businesses to provide better services during the most intense shopping season.
If you would like to learn more about Rakuten Viber marketing throughout the year, do not hesitate to contact us.